The idea for the UNSETIC Files has been rattling around in my brain for a very, very long time–nearly as long as I’ve been writing. Part of what stopped me from writing stories about the organization and the men and women in it was largely the fact that I didn’t think that most of their stories would rate book-length (80,000+ words) manuscripts. I felt that many of the tales would be done a disservice by adding additional “fluff” to inflate the word counts. The advent of e-publishing and the rise in popularity and acceptability of novella-length fiction (short novels and long short stories, defined by a recent issue of The Writer as works of 15,000-80,000 words [see “Ask the Writer” in the February 2013 issue]) have given me more freedom to explore the characters, their stories, and their world.
The world of the UNSETIC Files is a braided universe, and by that I mean that there are common threads (characters and occasionally organizations) that bind the universe together. It overlaps with the Lost Angels universe (especially in the person of James McCullough initially and later characters like Ridley Thys and a few others), but within its own fabric has several characters that tie the stories together. As more stories are added to the universe, this will become increasingly clear.
As of this writing, I’m not sure how successful my little experiment will be–Bering Songs and Silence and Between Fang and Claw have only been out for about a month or so and there have been no reviews thus far, so it’s hard to say how well things are going or how clear the connections are. I’m looking forward to the day when people begin to see the connections and talk about them–but that day’s not here yet.
Someday, though, I hope they will. In the meantime, I’m going to continue this little experiment in episodic fiction and hope that the gamble pays off in the long run.
